WYSIWYG post editor in Safari and Chrome: User-Agent switcher now available for Chrome

[1992casey]

As Safari and Google Chrome users know, to post on Yuku, it's been necessary to choose to use the BBCode editor in your account preferences or be served up Yuku's plain text editor.

 

It turns out that the WYSIWYG editor should actually work in those browsers. The problem is that Yuku is blocking it. Because the WYSIWYG editor didn't work in Safari 2, it appears a nuclear bomb was dropped that blocked it from appearing in any version of Safari. Since Chrome is based in Safari, it's blocked in that browser, too.

 

To get around this, you need to change your user agent string. In other words, you'll need to "tell" Safari or Chrome to "tell" Yuku that you're using Firefox.

 

In Safari 3 (Mac), open your preferences, hit the Advanced icon, and check the "Show Develop menu in menu bar" option. In the Develop menu, pick one of the Firefox 2.0 (or above) choices in the User Agent submenu. I believe Safari 3 for Windows instructions would be similar; I can't check this out firsthand.

 

For Google Chrome, add this to the target field of your Google Chrome shortcut's properties:

-user-agent="Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"

You might want to work with a copy of your shortcut. Leave a space before the "-".

 

Note that web sites might rely on the user agent string to pick which code to send to you. If a site is suddenly behaving weirdly, "lying" about the browser you're using could be the cause.

 

Also, if you need to change your default post editor, hit the Account link in the Yuku navigation bar, hit the Preferences link in the Settings box, choose the editor you'd like to use, and hit Submit.

[Godspeed]

Confirming this works for Google Chrome. Sweet.

[1992casey]

Thanks, Godspeed. Since I don't have Windows, knowing that is more helpful than one might think. http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/smile.gif

 

I'm not sure if anyone has thoroughly tested all the toys the editor has to offer. For anyone who takes the time to play with this, it'd be appreciated if you could let us know what you might have to observe.

[Godspeed]

The only downside is it makes Gmail think I'm running IE6. Gone is my custom ninja background. Is there a happy medium here?

 

EDIT: not a huge deal as it only affects my surfing from work...

[1992casey]

I suppose you could set up two Google Chrome shortcuts--one with the user agent and one without--then exit and restart as needed. That could be annoying, though.

 

Hopefully, Yuku addresses this sooner than later so we don't need to mess around.

[Godspeed]

Yeah that's what I ended up doing. Modded the shortcut on the desktop but left the one in the taskbar as is. I like to see my ninjas on Gmail.

[1992casey]

Because we were setting Safari to pretend to be Firefox, I was assuming that we were doing the same for Chrome. I should have noticed the "MISE 6.0" in there. http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/wink.gif What if you tried adding this string (for Firefox 3.0.6) instead?

-user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6"

There are a boatload of possibilities here: UserAgentString.com - List of Firefox User Agent Strings. There could be one that's a better fit--this one's for Windows XP and British English--but I'd bet you'd really be splitting hairs by choosing one over the other.

[1992casey]

Better yet, you can grab your current Firefox user agent string from the "About Firefox" window. I think it's in the Help menu in Windows.

 

Here's the one for Firefox 3.0.6 for OS X... it ought to be just as good as the Windows one:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011912 Firefox/3.0.6

Here's what would be pasted into your Google Chrome Windows shortcut:

-user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6"

Another option for getting your user agent string would be to go to "What's my User Agent?" When I load up that page with Safari's normal settings, it correctly reports that I'm using Safari 3.2.1. A simple user agent switch via the Develop menu makes that site happily tell me that I'm using Firefox 2.0.0.12.

[Godspeed]

You are correct regarding the location of the "About Firefox" pop-up. It is in the FF Help menu for Windows.

 

Unfortunately, I time-out trying to log in to Gmail with the updated user agent, so I have to go back to HTML view. I guess Google doesn't like when I try to check their mail client with their compromised web browser. I can confirm that the posting editor works as it should though.

 

Thanks for your help, casey, but it looks like there's no fighting Google.

[1992casey]

A Yuku staff member has confirmed that the failure to load the WYSIWYG editor by Google Chrome and Safari 3/4 has been recorded as a bug and marked as "major."

 

Hopefully, the "major" part of this means that there'll be some kind of action taken so we don't have to use the sloppy spoofing workaround on any kind of long-term basis.

[1992casey]

A User-Agent Switcher for Chrome extension is now available. This will allow you to spoof sites into "thinking" you're posting in another browser.

A button will appear between your URL bar and the page menu that'll allow you to switch user agents on the fly. More customization is available by going to "Extensions" in the Tools menu, then hitting the options button next to the extensions name.

In the customization area, you can add more user agent strings; and you can add specific domains for which you'd like to to spoof your browser identity. I've chosen to fool yuku.com into "thinking" I'm using Firefox 3.6.3 for Mac.

[1992casey]

I'm closing this topic in favor of a new one with up to date information:

 

Dealing with post editor issues in Safari and Chrome

 

Please feel free to ask any pertinent questions in that topic.